Depth First
Live · 4 weeks

For a deeply empowering relationship to AI.

A 4-week course in AI Empowerment.

Empowerment, discernment, sovereignty. In this 4-week course, we train the capacities needed to use AI to step more fully into our potential, without losing ourselves in the process.

The four weeks

A bootcamp in how to relate to these tools.

Each session is a combination of teaching and context-setting, experiential exercises, dialogues, and group practices. There will also be labs and homework for each session to help you really land and integrate the material.

01
Week 01

Empowerment

The first taste. You'll build a website with AI as the learning vehicle — feeling directly what these tools can do when you give them the context they need. We'll get you set up with Claude Code and walk through prompting hygiene.

02
Week 02

Sophisticated approximations

What is this thing, really? We open the bonnet — tokens, context windows, agents, what actually happens when you type into Claude — without jargon and without dumbing it down, and learn a mental model that makes every failure mode coherent and predictable.

03
Week 03

Reaching edges

Where AI stops being a chat window and becomes a way to solve real problems and remove frictions in your work. We connect it to the rest of your life — your notes, your calendar, your email — and walk through real examples across domains. We'll also have the privacy conversation: what to share, what to hold.

04
Week 04

The mirror

The deepest beat of the course. AI as a tool for learning, self-discovery, and reflection — used carefully so it sees you without capturing you. Self-inquiry, learning something you've been meaning to learn, and empowering your relationship to learning itself. Embodiment practices for staying connected to yourself in real time as you work with these tools.

By the end you’ll have:

  • Several real artefacts you've built with AI — and confidence in using AI to create what you want
  • A working mental model of what AI actually is, that makes its failures predictable
  • AI connected to your real workflows — notes, calendar, email
  • A practice of using AI for learning and self-inquiry, without losing yourself in it
  • Fellow practitioners on this journey together of becoming empowered with AI
  • Discernment for when to lean on AI, when not to, and how to feel the difference
Who this is for

For anyone who wants to remain sovereign and empowered through this AI era.

You don’t need to be technical. Most people who take this aren’t. The point is the relationship to the tools, not the syntax. If you can have a conversation, you can do this.

It’s for people who sense AI is reshaping them and would rather do that consciously than be carried along by it. People who feel quietly overwhelmed by the pace and don’t quite know where to begin. People who refuse to outsource their judgement. People who’d rather use these tools to step more into who they already are than to be replaced by them.

Your instructor
Nick Hayes, founder of Depth First

Nick Hayes.

I’m the founder of Depth First. Software engineer by training. Software trainer for the better part of a decade. Alongside that, a decade in coaching and deep relational work.

These two worlds that, for a long time felt separate, are now more clearly interconnected than ever. Staying connected to ourselves, being sovereign in our own hearts and minds, and trusting in our own judgement in the face of increasing uncertainty, are precisely the capacities that will be needed as we increasingly depend on these AI tools for knowledge work.

My coaching practice is about both discovery and creation. Discovering yourself and what’s really happening in you, so you can experience the freedom to create what you really want — both in your experience of being you (your being), and in your life circumstances. AI used well empowers all of this.

In closing

What’s available to you.

More empowered. More creative. More discerning. More sovereign. More yourself — through these tools, not in spite of them.

That’s what this course exists to train.

Waitlist

Be the first to know when it opens.

We’ll write when there’s something worth opening — when enrolment goes live, when early material is ready, when the next cohort is being shaped.

Join the waitlist

We’ll only use this to email you about the course.

Common questions

Things people are asking.

Do I need to be technical?
No. The course is built for non-technical people — writers, coaches, artists, makers, thinkers, anyone who wants AI to be a real part of how they work and learn. We start from where you are.
Self-paced or live?
Live. This is a cohort — one weekly session over four weeks, with breakouts and homework in between.
What if I miss a week?
Sessions are recorded. You can catch up. But the breakouts and the live questions are the bit that makes a cohort work — come if you can.
Can my organisation buy seats?
Yes — let’s have a conversation about that. Get in touch if you’d like to talk it through.